The girl who ran away from foster care took off without her diabetes medication, adding an extra layer of concern for the investigators responsible for tracking her down.
The teenager in a Texas foster placement went from Austin to Houston to Dallas and across the state line to Oklahoma as investigators worried about potential medical complications and whether she would get lost in a sex-trafficking ring. Still, thanks to pinging cellphone signals and a team of investigators responsible for finding foster kids who run, the girl was found within two days.
“She was sent to the hospital immediately because her sugar levels were significantly high and she would have died,” said Damaris Nicholson, part of the special investigations unit at the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. “We all know what happens when a youth in our care dies: the scrutiny, and the challenges and the ‘what could we have done.’”
Finding the girl is one of the success stories of a 300-investigator unit in Texas responsible for finding children and teens who run away from foster homes, residential treatment centers and child welfare caseworkers trying to visit their homes.
Colorado has no such unit.
But an Office of the Child Protection Ombudsman task force charged with finding out why so many kids are running away from out-of-home placements is looking at Texas for a possible solution. Texas’ child welfare division created its program in 2005 and it’s grown to include 300 investigators, many of them former law enforcement officers, responsible for finding kids across 254 counties.
The Colorado task force was created by the state legislature after a joint investigation by The Colorado Sun and 9News in 2021 into the number of runaways from youth residential treatment centers. The investigation, which involved the news agencies suing the state over the failure to release abuse and neglect information, found that two boys, 12-year-old Timothy Montoya and 15-year-old Andrew Potter, died after leaving Denver-area centers and getting hit by cars. The group will make final recommendations to the state legislature in October 2024.
How it works in Texas
The Texas absconder unit includes investigators who used to work as state troopers, homicide detectives, undercover narcotics officers and detectives who specialized in crimes against children, said Greg Eakens, the Texas department’s director of special investigations, as he answered questions from Colorado’s task force.
“You need to look for these kids like they’re your kids,” said Eakens, who was a police officer for 24 years before joining the child welfare division a decade ago. Or, “look for them like you’re looking for somebody that owes you money.”
“The children that run, they’re either running to something or from something, and I like to think that they’re running away from a good environment to something that’s not so great, so we need to find them and we need to get them back into care.”
Not all of the former law officers know how to connect with kids, but the ones who can are better at their jobs, he said. Willingness to work at night and on weekends is also a plus.
“Who is willing to answer their phone after 5? That’s a big deal. Some of the kiddos that I’m actually most fond of gave me a lot of headaches — 11 p.m. phone calls. ‘Greg, I told you I was going to check in and I didn’t want you to be mad at me. I’m OK. I’m safe. I’ll call you in the morning.’”
When children are found, investigators attempt to conduct “recovery interviews,” trying to find out why they ran and whether any investigation into a foster home or a residential center is needed. “If they identify something that’s happened at the treatment center or foster home, that’s a great opportunity for us to pursue that,” he said, adding that his unit would involve law enforcement or child welfare caseworkers, depending on the allegations.
“We can’t make the children talk to us, so if we go in there and they’re still coming down if they’re on substances or just anxiety or whatever, and they tell us where to go, we do. But then we’re coming back and trying to re-engage them for that conversation,” Eakens said. He will tell them, “I’m probably gonna be back in a day or two. You want me to bring you anything?”
“Sometimes that’s as simple as a Dr. Pepper.”
The Texas unit is responsible for finding kids who are in the state’s custody, including in foster placements, but the unit will also look for children who run away because child welfare caseworkers are coming to the door of their biological parents’ home. In those cases, the children are often younger than those who run away from group homes and residential centers.
Some members of the Colorado task force questioned whether such a unit should exist as part of the Colorado Department of Human Services, which includes child welfare, or if it should act as a law enforcement unit housed elsewhere in state government.
Dennis Desparrois, with the state child welfare division, said department leadership is “skeptical” about creating an absconder unit. He questioned whether such a unit would have prevented the deaths of the two boys who ran away from Denver-area residential centers and were struck by vehicles.
“This thing would have not helped Timothy Montoya and it wouldn’t have helped the other youth that ran,” he said. “A huge chunk of our runaways are very short-term runaways, so this team wouldn’t be able to intervene fast enough. A majority of our runaways … are back at the facility before you could even implement this team.”
A small percentage of the children and teens in foster care are generating the majority of the runaway reports, Desparrois said. “It’s repeat runs,” he said. “They often look like running to the 7-Eleven and asking people for cigarettes and stuff like that and then they come back.”
He suggested the group consider a more narrow approach, such as launching an investigative unit only after young people in foster care had been gone for at least a couple of days. Exceptions could include kids with medical needs and those who are suicidal, he said.
Colorado had about 30 young people in the past year whose child welfare cases were closed because they ran away and were not found, according to Department of Human Services data. But task force members say the data is incomplete and the state is failing to keep track of how long kids are missing and why they ran away.
In Texas, 1,334 children went missing from foster placements last year. Of those, 1,219 were recovered. Texas data shows that 131 were victimized in some way while they were missing from care, including 56 who were sex trafficked.
Colorado has about 3,500 children living in foster families, residential treatment centers and other placements. Instead of an absconder unit, the state has in the past hired private investigators to track down young people who’ve gone missing from the juvenile corrections system.
Task force member Brian Cotter, a Denver police sergeant, said law enforcement should lead the absconder unit if Colorado creates one. To succeed, the child welfare division would need to share data with law officers, he said. “I don’t think you can credibly say that there’s a downside to dedicating resources to these kids that are fleeing,” he said. “If there is a downside, I think it might be that there’s a perception of ‘the runaway police are coming after me.’”
Timothy Montoya’s mother, a member of the task force, suggested that if Colorado creates a search team, it should look similar to a crisis response team, including a law enforcement officer and a mental health professional. “Where we’ve got somebody that is law enforcement and can help in locating the kid, but also someone that can immediately intervene and start doing assessments,” Elizabeth Montoya said.